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Lecture | LACG Meetings

Pluriform prosody in the voice, face, and hands

Date
Thursday 21 September 2023
Time
Series
LACG Meetings
Location
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Room
3.07 (& Teams)

Abstract

Speech conveys both segmental information about vowels and consonants as well as suprasegmental information about for instance intonation, speech rate, and lexical stress; also known as the prosody of speech. In this talk, I will demonstrate that listeners are keenly sensitive to spoken prosody conveyed through both the auditory and the visual modality. Focusing on lexical stress in Dutch, our work showcases the vast variability in how different talkers produce stressed vs. unstressed syllables, while also unveiling the remarkable flexibility with which listeners can learn to handle this between-talker variability. It also emphasizes that lexical stress is a multimodal linguistic phenomenon, with the voice, lips, and even hands conveying stress in concert. In turn, human listeners actively weigh these multisensory cues to stress depending on the listening conditions at hand. Thus, prosody - in all its multisensory forms - is a potent factor in speech perception, determining which words and speech sounds we hear.

Teams Meeting ID: 354 852 540 757

Passcode: SE97ME

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